Libya: A Word About War Powers

What does the rebel advance in Libya have to do with us? In obvious ways, a great deal: our sympathy, our common aspirations, our sense of what makes for a saner and safer world all involve us. It is good to see dictators fall, and people dancing about freedom. (Read Andrew Solomon on what comes next.) But how about in a practical sense? “We hear NATO aircraft in the sky,” Richard Engel, the NBC correspondent, said. “We’ve been feeling the effects of them.” So is this our war?

Obama, in a statement from Martha’s Vineyard Monday, made it sound like our involvement was mostly in the past—as if we’d fixed a flat tire a couple of months ago, and then let the rebels drive on themselves, with a few Europeans showing them the way:

And in March, the international community launched a military operation to save lives and stop Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks.

In the early days of this intervention the United States provided the bulk of the firepower, and then our friends and allies stepped forward.

He credited the drive to Tripoli this way:

The opposition increased its coordination from east to west, took town after town, and the people of Tripoli rose up to claim their freedom.

That may all be the case, but the United States and NATO (those terms overlap) have also increased their coordination, and quite a bit. The A.P., in a report today, called aspects of our involvement an “open secret”:

Covert forces, private contractors and U.S. intelligence assets were thrown into the fight in an undercover campaign operating separately from the NATO command structure.

But the President is not just being modest. The Obama Administration has, for a couple of months now, been arguing that our country is not even involved in “hostilities” in Libya. That is plainly untrue. We have been conducting military activities that aim to overthrow a government; our troops are flying and dropping bombs that kill people—and just because they may be bad people does not make this operation something it isn’t. The Obama Administration persisted in its strange non-definition because it just really, really didn’t want to go to Congress about this, as the War Powers Resolution required him to do after sixty days, or, if really necessary, ninety. (Glenn Greenwald has a discussion of the legal questions.) One can be very glad to see Qaddafi fall, and even proud that our country played a role, and still be unhappy that Obama dodged the law. The President seems to have drawn on the legal opinions of Harold Koh, a State Department lawyer, who, as the Times described recently, has deeply disappointed many who once saw him as a strong voice against unchecked executive power.

Congress is difficult; most of us wouldn’t want to talk to it, either. It’s still worth doing so, on many levels. A political cynic might game out ways the Administration could have cornered Republicans on the question of whether they wanted to let Qaddafi do what he liked; an idealist might hope that a debate over whether to approve the action might have engaged the country in what is always a moral question: whether and when to fight. A practical person might just be glad for the precedent, and for some answers about matters like cost. And wars should be a little hard to start; they certainly aren’t easy to end.

Will it make a difference, if Qaddafi falls tonight, if we called this war a war? (Apart, but one hopes never so far apart, from the rule of law mattering, that is.) Maybe more than ever: if we are not honest about our role, then how will we assess our responsibility for whatever regime takes Qaddafi’s place? Our vagueness about what we are doing encourages a certain incuriousness about whom we are doing it for. The impolite fiction about “no hostilities” might have been sustainable, in a public-relations sense, when the Libyan war was in a stalemate. Now, with armies on the move and cities falling, it has to be reckoned with.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.